Hey HN, we’re Eric and Christian, cofounders of Frigade (https://www.frigade.com), a developer tool for building high-quality product onboarding. Here’s a demo video: https://frigade.com/video/demo.mp4. Also, the “Frigade demo checklist” on our home page (https://frigade.com/#demo) was built using Frigade itself, if you want to give it a spin.

Onboarding is a critical first experience for software products. It makes a big difference for customer activation and retention. However, onboarding experiences often do not get the attention they deserve because, without good tooling, they’re a pain to build. At a previous startup, Christian and I were surprised at how hard it was to get right. It took a ton of time that would otherwise have gone to our core product. We also knew that much better tooling was possible because we had experienced it in the internal tooling at LinkedIn, where we worked at a previous job.

Established software companies such as LinkedIn, Uber, Vanta, and many others invest in internal developer platforms to give their teams advantages like the ability to quickly build great onboarding experiences. But these platforms only get built at scale. With Frigade, our goal is to develop the platform that every growth engineering team would love to have, but can’t afford to build themselves.

There are no-code tools for onboarding (e.g. Pendo, Appcues, Intercom), but they’re rigid and clumsy. They’re built for marketers and managers rather than developers, so they sit on top of your product instead of feeling native. They’re not defined in your codebase, frequently break without teams noticing, and there are limits to what you can build with them. Unlike these tools, Frigade uses native SDKs and provides an API for developers to build new onboardings in code.

How to use Frigade in your product: first install our SDK (React for now); choose a production-ready Frigade UI component or go headless; create a “Frigade Flow” in our admin panel and hook it up to the SDK (Flows are where you set the logic, targeting, content, and more); publish your flow to go live.

Frigade automatically tracks users’ progress through your Flows. Your team can sign in to our admin panel to see which customers have completed what steps or input data, and you can use our API to sync tracking events to your analytics platform, send drip campaign (emails that guide users through setup), or show product reminders (e.g. “Finish connecting your data” banners). Frigade leverages server-driven UI, so once a Flow is live, you can easily update content (e.g. change copy, add another step) and logic (e.g. who should see it and when) in real-time without new code deploys.

We’ve spent most of our time building out the platform with early customers so far, but our self-serve flow is (ironically) coming soon. In the meantime, our demo video gives you the basic picture: https://frigade.com/video/demo.mp4. Please let us know if you’re interested in trying Frigade, we’d love to get your feedback on what we’ve built so far! We work mostly with web-based B2B companies today, and our pricing is competitive with other tools on the market.

What has been your experience with product onboarding? We’d love to hear more about what’s worked well and what’s been a pain in the ass—as well as anything else you’d like to share.

Launch HN: Frigade (YC W23) – Faster, better product onboarding